With domain listing, you can’t escape as easily.  Your sending domain, regardless of the IP you’re on will still have that listing against it.  Obviously, the IP reputation will still be a bug factor but this added factor of domain based reputation means the sender has culpability for their actions.

So you can’t now escape your bad sending practices – definitely a good thing for the future of email marketing but what could that mean for you?  Well, let’s say you are a good sender but fall into trouble for some reason; you could end up having your works email address blocked due to your marketing activity.

A good way to avoid this is to put all of your marketing mails onto a different domain so that any of the repercussions of your marketing activities don’t directly effect the day to day running of your company.

Of course, that should never happen in the first place if you are a legitimate conscientious sender.

Obviously if you are new to this, take a look at these basic starting up posts:

5 Tips to making your campaign start successfully

Email Design Essentials

Now back to the question in hand, Spam…

I think when people that have just come into email marketing  they tend to think of Spam as just a way of stopping their email getting into the recipients inbox.

What that is referring to is the rules set out by the Spam filters and is only half of the Spam spectrum.  In this post I’m going to attempt to cover every aspect of spam (or more realistically, all that I can think of).   

Why have I received a Spam complaint?

A question that you’ll most likely come across during your email marketing life.  Usually the answer boils down to one of these:

The recipient doesn’t remember asking for your mail or when they signed up.

The usual cause of this is using old email address lists or your mails have been too infrequent. 

This is why most email marketing experts will say keep your mails regular.  Now we don’t mean it has to be religiously regular.  This can cause you to send out a pointless email which is just as damaging as not sending out emails for a prolonged period; I will though, come to that in a minute.

The other reason for this is could be that you’re using a purchased list.  In which case, the answer is very simple as to why they don’t remember signing up for your mails.

A good way to prevent this is to remind them of the address they used to sign up with and the date you subscribed.  Personalisation of the email as well can restore faith that they did once sign up for this email.  This can at least prevent them from thinking it is spam and if they no longer want the email, they can go for the unsubscribe link instead of the report spam button.

Your emails aren’t interesting

Something I have already brushed upon, uninteresting emails can cause Spam complaints.  Yes you’re email is legitimate and they did sign up but recipients don’t have to abide by the laws and can still report it as spam if they feel it is not interesting as it can sometimes be an easier process.

The solution for this are pretty straight forward: be interesting.  Though we will always say be regular, don’t be regular for the sake of it.  Have some interesting content or offer in there to keep it engaging.  That way, not only will that campaign be interesting and produce some returns but it will encourage future opens; a win-win situation.

The Unsubscribe process is hard/annoying

I’ve found that some companies are just annoying with their unsubscribe process.  There are still quite a few companies that feel offended by unsubscribes and feel that it is a sign of a poor campaign etc. so actually hide the unsubscribe away.  This just isn’t the case – an unsubscribe can be just that the recipient is no longer in need of what you offer.  Unsubscribes can also act as valuable research into what makes appeals to your subscribers.  Hiding away that link will do nothing but annoy your subscriber and do much more damage than just letting them go.

Another annoying unsubscribe trick is when companies sell on your address to affiliates.  Let’s say you enter a competition and the company that collects your address decides to send emails to you from affiliates.  You don’t want these emails and attempt to unsubscribe.  The problem is, you’re only unsubscribing from that one off campaign from that affiliate and so still receive a barrage of pointless emails – By the third email, niceties are over – can’t. click. report. spam. button. quick. enough.

It’s simple, don’t make it hard to unsubscribe.  Unsubscribes don’t have to be the end anyway.  Read my post on positive unsubscribe processes and turn that unsubscribe into an opportunity.

Also, if you ask for you subscribers to unsubscribe by replying by email; make sure you honour it.

You’re Sending too Frequently

The point has become even more relevant this year as people turn towards email marketing as the most cost-effective direct marketing method.  Someone needs to meet the sales quota and instantly thinks about “blasting” another email to hit their targets.  Soon the emails have such poor content and become uninteresting that the user either switches off forever or gets annoyed and hits spam (especially if you take your time with previous unsubscribe requests).

The solution to this is to always try and keep to a set frequency and only rarely increase your send if you really have something important to say or offer.

Why has it gone into the Junk Folder?

This is slightly more predictable as there is a general set of rules to abide by but once again, you can’t account for companies personal spam rules.

Spam Keywords

Certain words will trigger a spam filter to mark it as potentially unsolicited email.  These words actually get assigned different scores based on the likelihood of the email being spammy and these scores add up throughout your email.  If you end up clocking up a high score throughout your email, it will end up junked.

To avoid this, don’t use too many spammy words!  Mailingmanager offers in its system a pre-mail spam keyword check that will run through your mail and highlight the spam keywords for you.  Just get that score low and you stand a much higher chance of inbox delivery.

Image to Text Ratio

Some emails won’t be delivered due to the massive amount of images in them.  This is because when Spam filters tightened a while ago on spam keywords, spammers chose to insert all the content that was getting blocked into images to avoid the content filters.

Avoid using images too much.  You can usually push your branding without having images everywhere.  We always advise you do this anyway as many clients now have images blocked as standard and by having your message as text, you can still guarantee you get your message across despite image blocking.

Reputation

The reputation of your sending server can play a massive part in the delivery of your email; in particular, in the B2C area of email marketing.  Many of the major online email clients (hotmail, yahoo etc) will check the originating source of the email and then decide where to deliver it.  A high scoring reputation will give the email a very high chance of delivery and vice versa.

Maintaining a good IP reputation is a big subject on its own but in short you must ensure that:

Lists are well maintained and cleaned

Unsubscribe requests are honoured

Of course one of the major advantages of using an ESP such as mailingmanager is that you don’t have to worry about any of this; we do it all for you.

Poor Coding

You just wouldn’t believe the amount of times I go through this with customers – and I pin all the blame on Microsoft for this.  Poor coding can cause deliverability problems as the filters reject bad coding (the sign of a spammer).

Why is it the sign of a spammer?  Because most true spammers do not care for html and instead go for creating their emails in programs such as Microsoft Word, which inserts all this non-valid html rubbish into their coding when creating an html page in there.

A lot of newbies to email marketing will tend to use Word to create the content of their campaign and then paste it over to their email from there.  The problem with that is it also transfers over some of this rubbish code with it so that it keeps the same fonts and sizes, which in turn hurts the deliverability chances of that email.

Best thing to do in this situation (as you’ve guessed) is to not use Word to create your content.  Programs such as notepad will work perfectly in creating content offline and then paste into your email and do the fonts within the campaign itself.

Common Mistakes

CAPITAL LETTERS in the subject header

There’s really no need to do this anyway as it makes your mail look unprofessional.  People in a bid to stand out in the inbox of their recipients put the whole subject header in capital letters.  Instead of grabbing their attention it has the complete opposite effect as the recipient will only ever view it if they look at the junk folder.

!!!

Yes we get it, you have a cracker of a sale on.  There’s more effective, more original, and less spammy methods to grab their attention than exclamation marks throughout the email and subject line.

The Clumsy Mistakes

There are a few slips that sometimes people don’t realise they’re doing or are just forgotten when creating a campaign that are worth remembering when sending out campaigns.

“Dear xxxx”

Spam filters flag this and give it a reasonably high score if you put Dear as the opening sentence to your campaign.  Try doing “Hi” “Hey” “Good Morning” etc. instead.

Text part doesn’t match html content

This is one of those lazy mistakes that can give your email quite a high spam score.  You’ve created your email and asked for it to be multi-part but instead of creating the text version, you’ve left it as the standard “your email can’t view this email, view it here online”.  The filters don’t like this.  Luckily for the lazy ones, mailingmanager has an auto text content creator within the system so use that to create an easy text version of your campaign.

Being too Spam word free

I have to put my hands up and say I only ready this a week or so ago and it was new to me then.  I also can’t for the life of me remember where exactly I read it so I apologise for not linking through the original article.

Apparently having an email that has zero spam keywords in is also bad and raises the alarm in the spam filters.  So whilst watching your spam keywords, make sure you don’t go over the top.

“Test” subject header

Obviously this will never go out to your customers but when you’re testing your campaigns, avoid using the subject line “test” as you may find yourself baffled as to why your email is going into the junk folder.

Sending tests to multiple people within the same company

So you’ve finished your email and you want to send it to everyone in your department to see what they think.  One or two get it but the rest either don’t or it takes ages for them to receive it.  The problem you’ve experienced is that your companies Spam filter has flagged your test as a Spam attack.  Try to keep it to only a couple and test across addresses.  This also helps you look at the rendering at the same time – handy!

Well there it is.  I must personally apologise for how long this ended up being as I really wasn’t planning for this kind of length but there you go.

I’m sure I’ve misseda few things out so please add on to this or even better, if you’ve wrote a post on the subject, put a link to the article in the comment box – even if you’re a competitor, I’ll accept the post.

I think it is well worth going through what they think as it doesn’t matter if you keep referring to what the laws say – it is what the subscriber thinks in the first place which is Spam as they are the people who are reporting the emails in the first place.

Below are highlights of his post and with some handy advice to minimise the chances of coming up against these same problems.

A Return Path study of consumers showed that 50.9% said they used the “this is spam” button “sometimes” or “all the time” when they no longer wanted to receive emails from a company.

To me, this points towards just recipients taking the easy and hassle free route out of unsubscribing.  I wrote a post on unsubscribe links a while back now, concentrating on the placement of the link to offer an easy way to opt out and reduce the Spam complaints.

Silverpop questioned consumers about what they defined Spam as, with 40% saying “email I don’t want to receive” and 35% “saying email from any commercial entity”

I think these results represent the “short-term fix mentality” of some email marketers out there.  Instead of building there lists up, they have gone out and bought a huge list and just massed mailed them. 

I have stressed previously the advantages of self built lists and I think are a majority of people who this won’t effect but at the moment we are in a situation where a lot of companies are turning there marketing efforts towards the cheaper method of email marketing.  I can’t help but have the feeling that the “short term fix mentality” is about to rise a bit in the near future. 

In the same Silverpop survey, consumers gave there main reasons for reporting an email as Spam as “getting too many emails from a source” and “when they had lost interest in emails they were subscribed to”

These answers show a great bit of advice to email marketers who are thinking of revving up their campaigns a bit to try and compensate for a down turn – don’t.  If you value the responses and income that email marketing brings to your company then don’t attempt the perceived easy route and choose to spend your time making the email relevant, interesting and appealing to your subscribers; that will see you getting closer to that extra revenue you’re looking for. I wrote a post about increasing active subscribers that goes into further depth about the subject.

Though there is more information within Mark’s post, I will end my post with two direct quotes:

“Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers do not want in their inbox.”

Yahoo Mail

“CAN SPAM lists the minimal standards an email must meet in order to avoid prosecution. CAN SPAM does not define what is spam, it only defines the things senders must do in order to not be violating the act.”

Laura Atkins – Word to the Wise

Read the whole of Mark’s post here

Don’t make the subject line too long.  You want the recipient to be able to read your whole message without it ending half way thr…..The subject line should be no more than 50 characters long.

Try to summarise your offer in your subject line.  Don’t be vague about it and just say “offer” or “sale”.  Try to let the customer know what is on offer or what you are reducing.  By doing this you are offering a first line of targeted marketing to your recipients and you may be able to entice more opens.  You also manage to avoid looking spammy by throwing in words like “free” and “offer” into the subject line.

Finally, try to leave CAPITAL LETTERS and punctuations!!! out of the subject line, this is just asking for your recipients to junk your folder.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Web safe colours

Spam filters seem to have a certain issue with colours that go out of the pre-set 216 colours that were set as ‘web safe’ all those years ago when computers only supported 256 colours.  Why this is the case still is slightly baffling, but best to be safe about it.  I found this colour chart that will help you keep in the boundaries  

http://www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/makapage/pics/net216-2.gif . 

Web safe fonts

Keeping along the same lines as the previous point made, web safe fonts also apply to keeping the filters happy.  Once again, a quick search on google brought up a chart for you to view of acceptable fonts.  I think this might rank higher in importance than the web safe colours as you also have the added worry of the inbox converting your well chosen, and nicely suited fonts, to the dreaded times new roman format and completely ruining the look of your newsletter.  And we can’t be having that….

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/img/Font-list-WinXP-Firefox-ClearType.png 

Wording

Remember, just because you haven’t used the word in a spammy context doesn’t mean that the spam filters will understand the context of it.  A prime example of this would be recently I was checking a newsletter we had created for spam problems and the system brought up that certain spam filters were marking the newsletter as pornography.  It turned out that a date in the newsletter (1918) had been caught by the spam filters as being pornographic (18). 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Hotmail has a multi-level spam filter in place to ensure it provides a high level of security against spammers.   The first level is the Blacklist check.  Hotmail will check against its own and 3^rd party blacklists to see if your IP and sender domain have been labelled as blacklisted. 

How do I make sure I don’t end up on the Blacklist?

Well the first thing to do is check and make sure you’re not on there already.  DNS Stuff can be checked to see if your IP has been blacklisted.  If though, you’re signed up to a mailing program like mailingmanager, you need to check for their name on the blacklist.  We personally check to see if we have been blacklisted on a daily basis.   Okay, so you’re not on the blacklist.  Now it is time to implement prevention of going onto the blacklist.  As I already mentioned in my previous blog “The Checklist Before your Campaign” you need to have an unsubscribe link in there.  Another handy thing is to set up feedback loops with the main providers.  Hotmails’ feedback loop information is here.  The feedback loop allows you to receive complaints about spam from the recipients on your list.  The best course of action is to delete these users from your mailing list, which in turn will lower your complaint rate and should eventually make you eligible for the whitelist program (we’ll come across that later).  Once again, if you’re signed up to a mailing program you won’t have to worry about this as the system should have one set up for you and will delete subscribers accordingly. 

Hotmail also runs a volume filter at the same time.  Basically, like every major email provider, if you send too many emails at one time, the filter will be triggered and you run the risk of having your email junked or rejected.  You can find a more in-depth explanation of volume filters here. 

How do I stop my email being caught in the volume filter?

The best thing you can do is limit the amount of emails you send out per hour/day.  Best thing to do is stagger your email per hour to an acceptable level.  I know this means you won’t get as instant results as you previously did but at least you’re increasing your chances of deliverability and ultimately, higher open rates.  At mailingmanager we stagger the high volume customers send-out on their behalf already and is probably common practice with mailing program providers. 

Once it has passed through these filters it will then check against the IP whitelist to see if the sender is on it whilst the sender domain is checked against Sender Score and safe-lists.  If it is accepted as a part of the whitelist for the email provider it will be allowed to go to the inbox. 

How do I get on the whitelist?

To get on the whitelist of an email provider you must adhere to the rules that it lays down to the sender.  Hotmails whitelist rules are here.  Basically, you are judged on sender history, email reputation and complaint levels.  As long as you have followed my previous instructions you should be in a position to apply to whitelists. If you are not on a whitelist or safelist another filter will then check against verifying filters that assess the validity of the email.  This is becoming an ever more determining factor in whether your email will get delivered into the inbox. 

How do I verify my IP and Sender Domain?

As a legitimate company this isn’t a problem.  Just make sure your email has SPF, Domain Key and Sender ID records in your email.  These records allow the email providers to verify that you are who you say you are and protect you from MTA’s who could send out emails using your domain and damaging your email reputation.  So not only does it help your deliverability but can also protect your companies reputation.  Once again, if you’re already a mailingmanager customer, you will already have these in place as part of our service (and to keep our reputation in check!). 

Then comes the final part of the check.  The spam filters will check your message for common spammy words and phrases, poor html coding, over-use of images (see my blog “Design vs The Spam Filters” for more details).  How much this filter matters is utterly dependant on previous filters and how your email reputation has been rated. 

So to Quickly summarise….

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your bounce handling.

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your feedback loop.

Manage a consistent email campaign, that if has a large list, is staggered in its sending.

Apply to SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys for email verification.

Providing all the above are upheld, apply for email providers whitelist/safelist. And finally…. 

Send me a thank you email and money for helping you. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk